Is There a Wage Payoff to Innovative Work Practices?

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically, and the economy lost many high‐wage jobs that had provided middle‐class incomes to less skilled workers, increasingly restricting these workers to low‐wage jobs lacking union or other institutional protections. A number of scholars have suggested that a new paradigm of work, often called high performance , is emerging that offers such workers more skilled jobs and higher wages. Using a unique national dataset, we find little evidence that practices associated with high‐performance work systems are associated with higher wages.